What an Arizona Lease Must Say

Arizona Does Not Give You a Lease Form

There is no official Arizona lease. The state does not publish a form and tell landlords to use it.

What Arizona does instead is allow you and your tenant to settle the terms yourselves. The rent. How long the tenancy runs. Who is responsible for what. If a term is not prohibited by law, you can put it in your agreement.

That is a great deal of freedom, and it puts the weight on the document. Every question your lease answers stays answered. Every question it skips gets answered anyway, by the law, and you may not care for the answer.

There are limits. Arizona prohibits a handful of terms outright, mostly ones that ask a tenant to sign away rights the law gives them, and a lease cannot bring those back however it is worded. See the clauses Arizona will not enforce.

This page covers three things. The one requirement Arizona puts on the document itself. What the law decides when your lease says nothing. And a useful provision that hardly any lease includes.

Fill In Every Blank

Arizona law says a written rental agreement must have all of its blank spaces completed.

Not most of them. All of them.

Leaving one empty is not treated as a small oversight, either. The law calls it a material noncompliance, which is a formal way of saying it counts as a real breach of the agreement.

That has a consequence attached, and it is worth knowing what it actually is. Whichever of you is in breach, the other can hand over a written notice saying what is wrong and giving ten days to put it right. If it is not fixed in those ten days, the agreement ends.

An unfilled blank is easy to fix inside ten days, so this is rarely a disaster. It is still a breach you handed the other side for no reason at all.

A form downloaded from the internet arrives full of blanks by design. That is the whole point of a form. But the blanks still sitting empty on signing day are almost never the easy ones. They are the questions neither person wanted to raise. Who cuts the grass. Whether the dog stays. What date the tenancy actually ends. Who pays if the air conditioning quits in July.

Those are exactly the questions you will wish somebody had answered.

So read the lease line by line before anyone signs. Where there is a blank, decide what belongs in it and write it in. The law does not say what to do about a line that has nothing to do with your situation. Writing “not applicable” is the common practice, and it leaves nothing empty.

Getting the Signed Copies Right

The same part of the law sets out a small exchange that is easy to skip. You hand your tenant a signed copy of the agreement. Your tenant signs a copy and gets it back to you, within a reasonable time.

Both halves are duties, and either one going unmet is the same breach described above, with the same ten days to fix it. Whether the signatures have to be witnessed or notarized is a separate question, and the answer is on signing an Arizona lease.

The half worth thinking about is your tenant’s, because it is the half you cannot control. Handing over your copy takes a moment. Getting one back three weeks later means chasing somebody who has already moved in and has no particular reason to hurry. So do the whole exchange at the signing, while you are both sitting there.

What Arizona Decides If Your Lease Says Nothing

This is the part worth reading closely. These rules apply whether or not you knew about them.

No Length Means Month to Month

Unless the agreement fixes a definite length, Arizona makes the tenancy month to month. For a roomer paying by the week the default is week to week instead, a roomer being a tenant who shares a bathroom or kitchen rather than having their own.

So a handshake arrangement is not “no tenancy”. If the two of you did settle a length out loud, that counts, though you would have to prove it later. If no length was settled at all, the law makes it month to month, with all the notice rules that come with one.

See the notice each kind of tenancy takes.

No Agreed Rent Means Fair Rental Value

Where there was no agreement of any kind, not even a spoken one, the tenant owes fair rental value for using and occupying the property.

Nobody enjoys that conversation, because fair rental value is a matter of opinion until somebody official settles it. In practice it rarely comes up, since almost every arrangement does agree a figure. The rule is in the law to cover the case where nothing was agreed at all.

Rent Is Due Without Anyone Asking for It

Rent is payable without demand or notice. You do not have to send a reminder, and a tenant who never got one still owes the rent on time.

If your lease does not say where and when, Arizona fills that in as well. Rent is payable at the property itself. For a term of a month or less it falls due at the beginning of the term, and otherwise in equal monthly installments at the beginning of each month. Rent is also divided up evenly, day by day.

That last one is the useful default. It is what makes a part month at the start or end of a tenancy work out fairly, without either of you having to argue it. If you want a different arrangement, put it in the lease.

One Provision Hardly Any Lease Includes

Arizona allows a landlord to ask for something most leases never mention, and it costs nothing to add.

You may ask your tenant for the name and contact details of a person they authorize to enter the property and collect their belongings if the tenant dies or becomes unable to act. That includes collecting their pet.

Your tenant does not have to give you this. They may provide it and update it, and it is offered rather than required. Asking costs you one line on the form.

Here is why it matters. If something happens to your tenant and nobody has been named, the law gives you waiting periods before you may act. One day for an animal. Ten days for everything else. Both counted from your first written attempt to make contact. After that you may deal with the belongings under Arizona’s abandonment rules, and you may treat the animal as abandoned, which means releasing it to a shelter or a boarding facility.

For a tenant living alone with a pet, that one line on the lease is the difference between a friend collecting the animal and the animal going to a shelter. It is not a cheerful thing to raise at a signing. It takes one line.

Where These Rules Come From

Arizona’s laws are collected in a set called the Arizona Revised Statutes, usually shortened to A.R.S. The number that follows points to one section of it.

You do not need these numbers to use this page. They are here so that you, or a lawyer you hire, can check the exact wording. Each one links to the official text on the Arizona Legislature’s website, which opens in a new tab.

• A.R.S. 33-1314 is the section on the terms of a rental agreement. It says the two of you may agree to anything the law does not prohibit, and it supplies the answers when you agree nothing: fair rental value where no rent was set, month to month where no length was fixed, and the rules about when and where rent falls due. The provision about naming someone to collect a tenant’s belongings and pet sits in the same section.
• A.R.S. 33-1322 is mostly about telling your tenant who owns and manages the property. At the end of it are the two rules this page leans on: that a written agreement must have every blank completed, and that each of you must end up holding a signed copy. It is also what makes failing either of those a material noncompliance.

A Short Checklist Before You Sign

None of this replaces reading your own lease, but it covers the ground on this page.

• A definite length, if you want one. Leave it out and you have a month-to-month tenancy.
• The rent, and where and when it is paid.
• Every blank filled in, with “not applicable” rather than empty space.
• Nothing from the list of provisions Arizona will not enforce.
• A signed copy delivered each way.
• A contact who can collect belongings and pets if something happens to your tenant.

Two duties sit outside this page. You also have to tell your tenant who owns and manages the property, which is covered under required disclosures, and the deposit rules are on security deposits.

If you would rather start from a form drafted for Arizona than adapt one written for the whole country, the lease form page covers the options.